An Entirely New Take on the Riedell

Here’s a pair of pencils that turned up at the Ohio Show last November: 

When I find one Riedell at a show, it’s been a great show. When I find two, it’s been twice as great. The green ringtop is an example I’ve admired for years, in the collection of the late Frank Tedesco; I became its successor custodian during the Saturday night auction. The full-sized red in a dealer’s junk box just an hour or so before the end of the show on Sunday – while I wonder how many times I walked right by it over the course of a four-day weekend, I can assure you that I didn’t walk right by it that last time!

The Riedell is one of those brands I’ve always bought no matter how many I’ve got at home - all in the hopes that if I examine them closely enough, I’ll find something imprinted on it to let me know something about their history. Alas . . . no matter how closely I looked, all I could find on these was the same markings I always see:

"Riedell Corp. NY Pat Pend’g." Oh well, I thought . . . at least these two help fill out the family a bit, and it was great to have Frank’s ringtop in the group:

Fortunately, this story does not end here. As I reviewed writing instrument patents one by one in the course of researching American Writing Instrument Patents Volume 2: 1911-1945, I ran across this one, for a repeating pencil that operated, just like the Riedell, by twisting and releasing the nose cone . . .

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and everywhere else you buy books, or you can order a copy signed by yours truly through the Legendary Lead Company HERE.

One Whale of a Pencil

I’ve had this one for a couple of years, with no leads (that’s "leeeds," not the stuff you put in the thing) to date:

The mechanism is Victorian, with a simple slider and a screw drive. If it weren’t made of something that appears to be bone, I’d suspect that the works were made by the Eagle Pencil Company.

In addition to the different barrel material, this one has an interesting imprint:

"Melville’s Patent Solid Ink."

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and everywhere else you buy books, or you can order a copy signed by yours truly through the Legendary Lead Company HERE.

Breaking News!

Hello all,

As many of you already know, in July I accepted a position as Editor of the Pennant, the journal of The Pen Collectors of America.  The PCA is a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of pen history, and there's been many times here at the blog that I've referred to documents that are kept in the PCA's online reference library and available for free to its members. 

I'm pleased to report that the first issue of the Pennant under my stewardship is going to press shortly.  An electronic copy of this issue will be uploaded to the PCA Pennant Archive in the next couple of days - I'll let you know when.  The printed version will be available... as soon as the printer gets it printed - hopefully next week. 

The printed copy will have an 8X10 picture of the "family portrait" of pen community folk we took at the 2014 DC show. 

Current members of the PCA will be able to read the electronic copy as soon as it is uploaded.  Kim Sosin will be delivering the mailing list for the hard copies to the printer early next week, so if you aren't a member of the PCA yet and want to receive the magazine, you'll need to join by this weekend at the latest.

Membership within the US is $40 per year.  You can join and pay online via Paypal at the PCA's website, http://pencollectorsofamerica.com.

The Matching Mismatch?

I can’t remember where this set came from, but there’s a lot to see with this one:

This set is packaged in a plastic box that feels just like the boxes in which you’ll sometimes find dress shirts packaged, so it is a miracle that any of these have survived. Best of all is the lettering on the corner:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and everywhere else you buy books, or you can order a copy signed by yours truly through the Legendary Lead Company HERE.

Wear it Well

This is one that I’ve had for a while, and I’ve been waiting for the day that I could write about it and say something better than "I don’t know."

The day has come, and yet as I started writing this, I went right back to "I don’t know" – as in I didn’t know where I’d put the darn thing, leading Truman the Cat and I to spend half an hour scouring the museum for this one! Fortunately, my recollection of what it looked like and roughly (very roughly) were I had seen it last eventually turned it up in the stuff-not-yet-photographed zone:

This fairly typical metal pencil, apparently from the early 1920s, has "Bonnwear" imprinted on it. I hadn’t seen the name before, and after a bit of poking around with nothing to show for it, the pencil quietly slipped into my dead letter office years ago. Until the other day, about the closest thing I’d ever found to that name was the "Bon-Ton," but I knew that probably wasn’t right. And it wasn’t.

Then I stumbled across that 1922-early 1923 volume of issues from The Jewelers’ Circular, the same bunch that unraveled J.C. Wood & Sons for me recently. No focused search took me down this road, and I was just electronically thumbing through old issues when I ran across this advertisement in the November 22, 1922 issue . . .

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and everywhere else you buy books, or you can order a copy signed by yours truly through the Legendary Lead Company HERE.

Another No-Name Heard From

Online auction descriptions are notoriously unreliable, especially when the object being described looks as bad as this:

Fortunately, it doesn’t take much to get these cleaned up – just some buffing compound, a rag, and a few minutes was all it took to get things looking much better:

The seller had indicated that this was a "Krest" pencil, a statement I found intriguing. Sure enough, pencil in hand and all cleaned up, there it is:

I haven’t found anything at all about this one. Nothing. No advertising, not so much as one decent clue. None, that is, except for these:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and everywhere else you buy books, or you can order a copy signed by yours truly through the Legendary Lead Company HERE.

Make That "Almost Always"

I made an offhand comment here about a year ago ( http://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-waterman-96.html ) that I’d only seen clipless Waterman Patrician pencils in black, like Joe Nemecek's example, a picture of which was included in the article:

All, that is, except the one I found at the 2013 DC Supershow a few months later:

To learn more, this full article is included in The Leadhead's Pencil Blog Volume 3, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and everywhere else you buy books, or you can order a copy signed by yours truly through the Legendary Lead Company HERE.